SolaceSoul

How about simply doing it because it’s a nice thing to do?

I can’t believe this is even a conversation. Tip service workers, you cheap ass muthafuckas. Especially in developing countries. Who cares if they ask or remind you about it? They work for so little. Take an extra roll of small bills to the saunas with you and use them for tips. If breaking a 50 reais ($10 USD) into smaller bits and disseminating it to those who provided you a non-sexual service is going to break you, then maybe you shouldn’t be traveling or even leaving your house at all.

Not a fan at all of his husband (now widow) Glenn Greenwald, but David seemed like a lovely person, who definitely was a rare garoto / beach boy success story. So much accomplished and such promise left, and far too young to leave this Earth — not to mention such an awful way to go. Those poor children that he leaves behind. ————————————- Obituaries David Miranda, Brazilian gay rights activist and legislator, dies at 37 He assisted his husband, journalist Glenn Greenwald, in disseminating information from classified U.S. documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden David Miranda at his office in Brasília in 2019. (Sergio Lima/AFP/Getty Images) By Fred A. Bernstein May 10, 2023 at 2:47 p.m. CT David Miranda, a Brazilian gay rights activist and former lawmaker who assisted his husband, journalist Glenn Greenwald, in disseminating information from classified U.S. documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, died May 9 at a hospital in Rio de Janeiro. He was 37. Greenwald announced the death, which occurred a day before Mr. Miranda’s 38th birthday. After being hospitalized with a severe gastrointestinal infection in August, Mr. Miranda spent nine months in intensive care, where he battled additional infections but occasionally rallied, according to Greenwald. No immediate cause of death was reported. The son of a prostitute, Mr. Miranda was raised by a neighbor in a desperately poor Rio neighborhood. He rose to prominence as a groundbreaking gay politician and fierce opponent of the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2022. Mr. Miranda ranked among Time magazine’s 100 “next generation leaders” in 2019 because of his outspokenness on behalf of Brazil’s poorest and most-marginalized communities. Mr. Miranda, who met Greenwald in 2005 on Rio’s Ipanema Beach, entered politics in 2016, when he became, by all accounts, the first openly gay man elected to Rio’s city council. Two years later, he ran for the federal legislature with the Socialism and Liberty Party, known by its Portuguese initials PSOL. Mr. Miranda lost the 2018 election but gained a seat the following year after lawmaker Jean Wyllys, another openly gay member of PSOL, left the country following death threats. Mr. Miranda was elected to fill his seat. “Obviously, I’m afraid for my life or what can happen to my family,” Mr. Miranda said in a radio interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 2019, “but in moments like this you have to be brave. People need a voice.” Before entering politics, Mr. Miranda gained international attention while carrying computer files related to documents leaked by Snowden, a computer intelligence consultant whose employer worked with the National Security Agency. In 2013, Snowden had released a trove of classified material to Greenwald and Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker living in Germany. Among the disclosures were details on surveillance by the NSA and other agencies. Several months later, Mr. Miranda was enlisted by Greenwald to ferry a thumb drive from Poitras back to Brazil. During a stopover at London’s Heathrow Airport, Mr. Miranda was detained under Britain’s anti-terrorism law and held for nine hours. “I was sure I was going away to Guantánamo forever,” he later said. But he made it home to Rio and sued the British government, claiming it violated his rights as a journalist. A British tribunal ruled in 2014 that Mr. Miranda’s detention was lawful although it was “an indirect interference with press freedom.” (Snowden did not return to the United States, fearing arrest, and was granted Russian citizenship in 2022.) “Journalism is not a crime,” Greenwald said after his husband’s detention, “and it’s not terrorism.” Mr. Miranda and Greenwald met in 2005 when the latter, then a lawyer in Manhattan, traveled to Brazil for a two-month vacation. On the beach, Mr. Miranda was playing volleyball and accidentally knocked over Greenwald’s drink. He apologized profusely, in Portuguese. Mr. Miranda and Greenwald went out to dinner that night and began living together less than a week later. Their mutual attraction, Greenwald later told the New York Times, was like “two asteroids colliding,” and they soon married. “I didn’t speak much English,” Mr. Miranda told Out magazine in 2011, “and he only knew a few words of Portuguese, but we communicated everything important. When you meet the right person, you know it.” To stay in Brazil with Mr. Miranda, Greenwald had to stop practicing law. He threw himself into blogging, first with Salon and then for the Guardian. He developed a following writing about the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their effect on civil liberties back home. Greenwald’s pieces attracted the attention of Snowden years before the leaks. In 2014, The Washington Post and the Guardian were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series of stories that exposed the NSA’s global surveillance programs. The lead journalists on the project — The Post’s Barton Gellman and Greenwald for the Guardian — based their articles on Snowden’s disclosures. “Of everyone who had a hand in the 2013 revelations of global mass surveillance, my dear friend David Miranda was perhaps the most righteous — and pure,” Snowden tweeted after hearing of Mr. Miranda’s death. Snowden wrote that Mr. Miranda “never faltered” during his questioning by British authorities. Life on the streets David Michael dos Santos Miranda was born on May 10, 1985, to a prostitute in Jacarezinho, one of Rio’s most impoverished districts. He never knew his father, and his mother died when he was 5. Mr. Miranda was raised by a neighbor, but he went off on his own at 13. To get by, he shined shoes and cleaned buildings and sometimes scrounged from trash bins for food. Later, with Greenwald’s encouragement, Mr. Miranda graduated in 2014 with a marketing degree from a school in Rio. Mr. Miranda’s involvement in the Snowden leaks inspired him to enter politics, first by mounting an unsuccessful appeal to Brazilian authorities to grant Snowden asylum. A year after his election in Rio, he was joined on the city council by Marielle Franco, a Black woman with a female partner and a child. She became a mentor and “a mother figure,” Mr. Miranda said. Their joint initiatives included a law allowing transgender people to use their preferred names on government documents. “Fighting for the LGBT community,” he said, “is the core of my bones and blood.” In 2018, while being driven home after giving a speech, Franco was fatally shot. Mr. Miranda told Out magazine that he believed it was a targeted killing. (Two former policemen were later arrested in the crime and are awaiting trial.) “They could have pretended it was a mugging,” Mr. Miranda said, “but they didn’t bother. They wanted to send a message.” Mr. Miranda said being a pallbearer at Franco’s funeral “might have been the hardest moment of my life.” After Franco’s death, Mr. Miranda, Greenwald and their two adopted children traveled in cars with bulletproof glass. Mr. Miranda canceled some engagements for security reasons. In the federal legislature, Mr. Miranda led efforts for hate crime laws to protect LGBTQ+ communities. He also worked on investigative projects with Greenwald, who left the Guardian and helped found a news site, the Intercept, in 2014. (Greenwald resigned from the Intercept in 2020.) Mr. Miranda helped Greenwald with a 2019 story that quoted from hacked cellphone conversations between prosecutors and a judge overseeing a corruption case against former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose jailing cleared the way for Bolsonaro’s election victory. (Da Silva, widely known as Lula, came back to defeat Bolsonaro in 2022 and regain the presidency.) The bombshell story made Mr. Miranda and Greenwald targets of Bolsonaro, who had already declared himself “a proud homophobe,” and his supporters. In 2020, Greenwald was charged with “cybercrimes” by the Bolsonaro government. The case was later dismissed by a judge who said Greenwald had “instigated” hacking but was protected by press freedoms. In addition to Greenwald, survivors include their sons, João and Jonathan. In July 2019, the Times reported that Mr. Miranda was living alone and racked by “loneliness and alienation” in the capital, Brasília. He served out his term, however, and planned to run for reelection in 2022. His candidacy was withdrawn in October during his hospitalization. “Fighting for justice is necessary, an obligation,” wrote Mr. Miranda in 2018, “even if it is always risky.

The undisputed winner of The Most Popular At GP Saunas, for the 35th consecutive year. Also, coincidentally has simultaneously won Most Likely To Succeed At GP Saunas: “Yoi like me! You really like me!”

The Botafogo / Coca-Cola Metro station was reverted back to simply "Botafogo" in early November, 2022.

This thread is full of shitty posts.

This comment misses — or intentionally evades — my original point. “Opposites attract” (at least in physical, superficial measurements) is not really the norm at all in same-sex relationships worldwide — not just in gay enclaves. The international p4p scene thrives because what these men “go for” is usually not going for them — and spending power changes that, albeit usually temporarily.

I’m glad it all worked out for you, but in general, it’s not such a good practice to go into the suites before “negotiating” and agreeing to a rate / per time for the programs, especially if this is your first time dealing with s particular garoto.

Jesus H. Christ! What kind of rabidly insecure, pretentious queen would wear a fuckin’ sweater around his neck in a sauna?

Sorry, but the truth — and mirrors — are often painful. A fun sobering mental exercise: sit at the corner café in any prominent gay or gay-friendly neighborhood in the world (Farme do Amoedo & Rua Visconde in Ipanema, for example), and watch the many same-sex couples — and even the same-sex friends! — stroll by. Almost ALL of them are “twinning” — same build, physical features, age range, even dress.

This part should be thumbtacked to the top of this forum, because WAY too many posters here want to believe that (1) this rule does not exist, or (2) they are somehow the exception to that rule. “Twinning” is, by far, the most common denominator in dating, sexual and romantic attraction is same-sex situations and relationships. This is worldwide. In the limited pay-for-play situations and environments, money / power / influence is the great equalizer — meaning, if you don’t look the part of someone that you’re attracted to would more than likely be paired with, then your money overcomes that major hurdle.

Well, the decent ones do.

Pot, meet Kettle.

I would expect such a dismissive response about cultural differences in sexual identity from an aging white American snap queen. That train is never late. it’s so on brand for Western culture to believe that their identity is the only one that matters.

Sexual identity labels — like racial identity — are primarily an American / Western thing. Those who want to die on the hill of fitting everyone into nice, neat labeled packages will miss out on a whole world of opportunity outside of the USA.

Mineiro. The name he uses there is Mineiro.

Then why even bring it up in a public forum? And no, I don’t know your reasons for not wanting to walk around Copacabana (the most tourist-centric area in all of Brazil) or Centro. They could be very legitimate concerns or they could just be based on stereotype or paranoia.

What do you think prevents you from doing this? I’m genuinely curious.

Never say never, or just keep your eyes and ears open more. The last towel guy at 117 (who worked there for a few years before leaving — short, indigenous guy) was notorious amongst clients for directly asking for tips. Regarding your bill at ANY sauna, you should always check your line items on the screen before checking out. The same happens at all of them — sometimes it’s human error, and other times it could be a scam. Also, never let a GP take your key or order anything on your behalf — it’s too easy for them to order something you didn’t authorize (for themselves or friends). Some frequent clients have enough of a personal relationship with the bartenders so they know not to allow anything on their tab from a GP unless the client gives the okay to the bartender himself, but I realize not every visiting client can build that kind of rapport. So, guard your own key, locker number and tab.

Clube 11 is the former Sauna Planetario. Name change may have occurred about 5-6 years ago? The correct address is: Clube 11, R. José Duarte, 11 - Tororo, Salvador - BA, 40050-050, Brazil. However, in Google maps, the image and location that shows up is a yellow building down the block. It’s actually in this all blue building with an 11 painted near the door — but the map would have this building’s address as 87. Brazil is like that a lot.

And not even a good snappy comeback at that! She really thought she ate!

No, a passport is a travel / identification document specific to the country in which you are a legal citizen. It is applied for and received through that country’s State Department. A visa is a travel entry document for the country in which you wish to visit or stay for a protracted period of time — and it often / usually comes with restrictions and time limitations. It is applied for at that particular country’s embassy or consulate in your home country.

Same here. Been twice, not my cup of tea. But it’s something to do to break the monotony if you have a great deal of time here and a good group of friends to catch the ride with. I wouldn’t recommend it at all for those on a short tourist trip.

I don’t think they “worked together” in the way it seems you’re probably thinking about, as in being hired together. They just both worked at the saunas and both did programas. But if you want to know about people and what makes them tick, I simply suggest meeting them and taking a seemingly genuine interest in their lives. That seems to have worked for me for a lifetime far better than trading any second- or third-hand accounts on the internet.

Yeah that one works too. Just walk up to the counter and take a pointer and make motions like your sticking it up your hole. They will understand perfectly.